Very poor connection speed - what's going on?

I'm paying for 8mbit/sec connection but after a few days of slow connections, adslguide speed test just reported
Downstream 237.3 Kbps ( = 0.2 Mbps )
Upstream 377.9 Kbps ( = 0.4 Mbps )


What's going on?
What do I need to do to up my connection speed?

thanks!

Kai

PlusNet will use this to bring out the argument of "it's an 'up to' 8Mbps" connection...

But that aside, to answer your other questions:



What's going on?

- PlusNet is over stretched. The usage graphs would suggest gold/silver traffic is being dropped. They would also suggest the gold/silver style traffic (web, for example) is higher than usual tonight. They have also said their Centrals are unbalanced due to some recent work, and are seemingly pinning the blame on BT's maintenance recently.

What do I need to do to up my connection speed?

- Change ISP? Or a possibly less drastic approach seem to be to disconnect and reconnect a few times, until the Central that you land on is faster, but it's only a short term fix and before long you'll almost certainly find it's just as slow again due to PN's network being stretched to the max. Of course, you should confirm that the BT Speedtester is giving you "ok" results before being 100% sure that it's PN at fault, because there's a chance that it could be exchange contention.

wll, bt speedtest says
235 kilo bits per second (Kbps), your service bandwidth will have been quoted to you in kilo bits per second.

so what does that imply? That the fault's not with plusnet? Believe me, it wouldn't take much for me to try another ISP given that PN's looking so expensive at the moment..

regards

Kai

It is BTs/your router's/software's fault. You need to report this to plusnet, but I wouldn't count on them actually getting it through to BT within, hm, a week or so, by that time the problem is probably resolved.

how is that a router problem? would agree with the eariler post that one of plusnet's pipes is a whole lot slower than the other. Had the same problem yesterday and i rebooted the router, re-ran a speed test and it came out at around 3100kbps.

Definate problems at plus net towers though!

Darren

If the BT Speedtest (run correctly when connected to the tester account and not the usual ISP account of course) is very low then the fault doesn't reside in the ISP. It is therefore router, line or exchange problem - most likely the exchange though.